A Look at the Social Video Success of ‘The Lion King’ Teaser Trailer

Walt Disney Studios celebrated Thanksgiving this year by releasing the official teaser trailer for its live-action remake of the classic movie The Lion King. We partnered with emotion measurement AI company Canvs and social video analytics company Tubular Labs to check out fans’ response and the trailer’s performance.

The trailer has been the most-watched teaser recently released by Disney, according to Tubular’s V3 rating, racking up 32.3 million views on Facebook and 31 million on YouTube within the first three days. (Note: the comparative list included Incredibles 2, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Toy Story 4 and Mary Poppins. It’s also worth noting that when the list is expanded to include the 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, a teaser for that movie shared by Emma Watson is tops in Facebook views as measured by Tubular’s V3 metric, with 47.6 million views.)

As you’d imagine, the internet exploded with excitement, and video creators rushed to give their own take on the first glimpse: in the last week, there were over 4,600 videos uploaded that mentioned “The Lion King” in the title, accumulating 202 million views on Facebook and 85 million views on YouTube.

Notably, Mufasa (once again voiced by James Earl Jones) was one of the topics driving the most emotion among viewers of the trailer, surpassing the star of the film, Simba (voiced by JD McCrary and Donald Glover). A good portion of the commenters talked about the prospect of seeing Mufasa die again.